Gurdjieff's Fourth Way
Explanation
The Fourth Way is the spiritual system taught by George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (c. 1866-1949), enigmatic Armenian-Greek master who in his youth travelled through Central Asia, Egypt and other places searching for the sources of ancient knowledge. After settling in Moscow and then, fleeing the Bolshevik revolution, in Paris and Fontainebleau (Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, 1922), he transmitted a complex teaching that his disciple P.D. Ouspensky systematised in In Search of the Miraculous (1949).
Gurdjieff criticised with relentless irony the ordinary state of the human being: we live asleep, we are mechanical machines moved by external and internal stimuli; we have no unified self but a multitude of fragmentary I's taking turns in control; we possess no true will, consciousness, memory or capacity for action. The first step is to honestly acknowledge this condition, instead of the flattery our culture offers about our supposed freedom and consciousness.
The path proposes a very rigorous work on oneself: self-remembering (continuous self-observation), division of attention, work on the centres (intellectual, emotional, motor, instinctive, sexual, higher), exercises of presence, sacred movements (complex dances requiring conscious coordination), intentional shock at key moments. The Fourth Way is so called by contrast with the three traditional ways (fakir = physical body work; monk = emotional-devotional work; yogi = intellectual work); the fourth combines them in everyday life.
Gurdjieff developed an original cosmology with the Ray of Creation, the seven cosmoses, the law of three (three forces: active, passive, reconciling), the law of seven (octaves explaining the discontinuity of processes). His main written work is Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, an extensive deliberately difficult text that aimed to destroy false views of the world in the reader and sow something real. The Enneagram, a nine-pointed symbol, is another of his contributions (although the current use of the Enneagram as a personality typology comes more from Óscar Ichazo and Claudio Naranjo).
For the theory of consciousness, Gurdjieff proposes a critical phenomenology of the ordinary state: what we believe to be consciousness is not truly so; it is a dream in which we consider ourselves awake. Genuine consciousness requires awakening through prolonged and painful conscious effort. There are strong affinities with Sufism (some of Gurdjieff's Asian sources), with Buddhism and with certain Orthodox Christian hesychast currents.
His legacy was continued by Ouspensky (who later became somewhat distanced), Jeanne de Salzmann, John G. Bennett, Maurice Nicoll, Henriette Lannes, and has influenced diverse fields: literature (Jean Toomer, Gertrude Stein, Katherine Mansfield), art (Georgia O'Keeffe), psychology (Claudio Naranjo integrated Gurdjieffian elements), film (Peter Brook directed the film Meetings with Remarkable Men). As a critical diagnosis of modern man's sleep and as a rigorous path of awakening, the Fourth Way still has disciples in working groups worldwide. Its insistence that real consciousness is rare, difficult and essentially different from ordinary automatic functioning remains profoundly relevant.
Strengths
- Sharp diagnosis of ordinary automaticity.
- Integral practical method (body-emotion-intellect).
- Lasting influence in diverse fields.
- Demand for personal verification.
Main critiques
- Gurdjieff's controversial personality and manipulative group dynamics in some circles.
- Idiosyncratic and obscure personal terminology.
- Difficult external empirical verification.
- Superficial appropriation of the enneagram by self-help industries.